![]() ![]() There is rarely ever an objective and singular correct way to go about achieving something. ![]() One of the most gratifying aspects of web design and development is the lateral thinking involved. ‘Playing around with various chatbots, you’ll still experience the AI making a fair amount of mistakes.’ Photograph: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Shutterstock A user could attempt to skip this phase by leveraging a chatbot’s grasp of this knowledge, but in doing so, would forfeit ever grasping what decisions the machine was making on their behalf, why it was making them, whether they were even any good and, crucially, what else was possible. They have simply digested a load of resources and open-source materials that were already made freely available online for human beings to learn from. But it fundamentally confuses the ability to shortcut how to do something with developing a full understanding of why you would.ĪI chatbots haven’t broken some omertà around coding. The technology’s loudest cheerleaders are themselves the most eager to cultivate it, encouraging us to surrender to a robotic new dawn, where devoting the time to learn skills, perform tasks or know about anything may as well be considered a thing of the past. It’s tempting to succumb to the fatalism around AI job theft here. It’s not difficult to envisage a not too distant future where they can discern users’ needs and walk them through solutions, the role of a human developer seemingly consigned to history. Playing around with various chatbots, you’ll still experience the AI making a fair amount of mistakes – which a working knowledge of code helps correct – but you can also just talk these through with the AI, and it will attempt to solve them for you. Why bother wrapping your head around the needlessly convoluted nerdspeak required to display white text on a black background, when you can now simply ask a chatbot to do this in layperson’s terms and it will promptly serve up your code, complete with instructions? It seems I have accidentally timed my career change to coincide with a mass rollout of AI chatbots that have also learned to code, and that are – in many respects – already far better at it than me.Ĭode can appear alarming to the uninitiated: inscrutable “languages” that mostly read like a calculator having a stroke, but, according to AI’s most fervent evangelists, they no longer need represent any barrier at all. ![]() Eventually, the fun began to wear off and in an act of subversive defiance (or cowardly resignation), I took their goading advice, learned to code and pivoted to what I’d hoped would be a far more secure career in “web development”, only for recent advances in AI to supposedly render coding jobs a waste of time, too. I spent the best part of the 2010s working in new media, which – if you enjoyed being repeatedly laid off and then being inundated with jeering messages inveigling you to “learn to code” because your industry was doomed – was a great big laugh. ![]()
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